by Ian Christe
Breathing a second wind into glam metal, Appetite allied the desperation of Sunset Strip with the riffs of AC/DC and the aloof punk anger of the Sex Pistols, while interpreting thrash metal energy for conventional rock audiences. While marketers formulated metal into tidy boxes, the runaway success of Guns N’ Roses proved that kids listened to a much wider range of styles than record-store categories would suggest. The reborn street preachers of eclectic sleaze, they added a tinge of Megadeth’s knowing nastiness to the gypsy promises of Hanoi Rocks—the forerunning Finnish urchins whose entire back catalog Axl Rose himself rereleased in 1991.
Unlike the party rock of Poison, Guns N’ Roses spat out scathing social commentary from the perspective of Rose, a self-obsessed narcissist and top-notch rock star. As their real-life drugs, sex, and violence made National Enquirer headlines, the band wove its exploits into the self-referential story lines of a stream of MTV videos. At the same time, the band toured with Iron Maiden and proved a vehement force onstage, where previous graduates of the L.A. clubs had disappointed. A scheme was hatched in 1988 that Aerosmith, the godfathers of rock for gravel road grope sessions, would tour with Guns N’ Roses. Never mind the antidrug lectures from clean and sober Aerosmith, now seeking a piece of the power-ballad cash cow with tunes like “Angel.” Guns N’ Roses went to number one on July 23, the second week of the tour, and a Rolling Stone writer sent to interview Aerosmith came home with a cover story instead on the strange new heroes of Hollywood.
Guns N’ Roses recharged and almost single-handedly sustained the Sunset Strip sleaze system for several years. Axl Rose eventually brought about the destruction of the band, but his angry outbursts were intensely believable to fans who understood how he felt. As Rose lashed out at memories of his parents, school officials, and other childhood oppressors back in Lafayette, Indiana, the American listening audience rewarded his lack of self-control by scooping up 15 million copies of Appetite for Destruction. With this meteoric number, Guns N’ Roses set the target for which all other metal would aim in the coming decade.
Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash
(Deborah Laws/Metalflakes.com)
Down to its sprawling topography, the unique nature of Los Angeles sustained the heavy metal runaways of Middle America like no other city. “I think the reason L.A. was such a hotbed for metal in the 1980s is because L.A. is the biggest suburban city in the world,” says Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider. “It’s a city, so it had the clout of New York, but the way it’s laid out has a real suburban feel to it. It’s the perfect breeding ground for heavy metal. Something to do with sitting in your car, driving around, listening to tapes.”
In 1987, glam metal found a spiritual home apart from the Sunset Strip when MTV launched its successful Headbangers Ball program—a weekly special of exclusively heavy metal videos. The new show dropped former metalhead-in-residence Dee Snider after he requested a paycheck. “We did Heavy Metal Mania monthly for about a year and a half,” he says. “Then I asked for some money, and
METAL MOVIES
With half the metalhead population of America migrating to Hollywood during the late 1980s, it was inevitable that wild-eyed, raving heavy metal would influence the video revolution.
Straight to Video, Straight to Hell
Over the Edge (1979) Matt Dillon’s screen debut, a late-1970s look at the great wasteland of California’s tract-house paradise. Sort of the first of a trilogy, along with River’s Edge and Gummo.
Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978) Kiss versus Kiss = Kiss wins either way.
Heavy Metal (1981) Animated fantasy film featuring one minute of Black Sabbath in surround sound.
This Is Spinal Tap (1984) A heavy metal mockumentary that lampoons rock excess but almost doesn’t go far enough.
The Dungeonmaster (1985) Strange cable classic about computers and role-playing games, starring W.A.S.P.
Trick or Treat (1986) Skippy from Family Ties is possessed by the spirit of a devil-worshipping dead heavy metal star.
River’s Edge (1986) When a group of New Jersey teens discovers their friend is not only not a virgin but dead, Crispin Glover goes apeshit (with help from Dennis Hopper and Slayer songs).
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986) Headbanger vérité from Washington, D.C., the capital of unself-conscious behavior.
Rock and Roll Nightmare (1987) A Canadian heavy metal act discovers a demon while recording in a barn. Starring Thor.
Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988) An inside look at where hair was highest: Sunset Strip. Compelling arguments for why Metallica moved away from Los Angeles.
Black Roses (1988) A film with a message: Heavy metal bands are demons sent to destroy the lives of teenagers. Not based on fact, but starring real-life metal drummer Carmine Appice from Ozzy Osbourne’s band.
Airheads (1993) A low-expectation Adam Sandler comedy whose creators were looking into their cultural viewfinder upside down. “It was a real eye-opener as to why Hollywood movies suck, and why they cost so much,” says cult movie expert Rob Zombie, who cameos with White Zombie in the film. “I said, ‘You can do whatever you want with your movie, but I don’t want to be embarrassed. Get real kids in here, and we’ll play a real show—you can film that. They forgot to get any real kids, so I show up and there are all these extras wearing wigs, totally dressed up like 1982, Shout at the Devil. There were literally like sixty-year-old guys wearing these fake blond wigs.”
Gummo (1997) Chair wrestling, improvised slap fights, albino sex kittens, and a sound track featuring Brujeria, Burzum, and Bathory. Morally ambiguous chain yanking at its best.
they said, ‘Oh, well, this is publicity for you.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I can’t walk out my frigging front door without a bodyguard—the whole world knows what I look like!”
As Headbangers Ball grew into a Saturday night institution, a succession of willing victims hosted the show. From the comfort of their living rooms, viewers made great sport of bashing two hopeless VJs in particular: straight arrow Adam Curry and well-connected Sunset Strip club owner Riki Rachtman. “I thought [Rachtman] was very disinterested in what he was doing,” singer Bobby Ellsworth of Overkill told Metal Dreams. “I thought he couldn’t give a flying fuck who was sitting next to him. Maybe he and I just didn’t hit it off, but I’ve really had no interesting conversation with this guy after meeting four times. He hasn’t heard one song on the record and he’s gonna talk it up like it’s the best thing since canned beer. It was one of the more painful things to do.”
Changing MTV’s approach, Headbangers Ball at least nodded to the emerging thrash metal genre by occasionally squeezing one or two clips into a three-hour episode. “MTV was a joke,” says Megaforce Records’ Maria Ferrero of getting Overkill and Testament played. “There was no outlet except Headbangers Ball, and even that was political. It was hard. It wasn’t payola, it was getting a video to them that somebody liked, and the stars being aligned properly so they’d say, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll do it.’” Jumping through those hoops could pay off handsomely—after MTV briefly embraced Testament’s Practice What You Preach, sales of the LP zoomed to 285,000 copies.
In the heart of Hollywood, however, the music industry shunted heavier metal bands away from the epicenter of popularity. Most gigs on Sunset Strip were still glam showcases, where bars were essentially hired out as audition rooms for A&R scouts. “That was kind of a sad thing,” says Katon W. DePena of Hirax—depicted on the group’s second album leaping out of a garbage dumpster. “We didn’t really care about it, but we knew it wasn’t going to help our scene at all. In fact, it made it worse for us, because at our shows there was more movement on the dance floor, and a lot of those club owners didn’t like it.”
Hard-core headbangers hit back against the light of heart. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles and signing to Metal Blade, Chicago transplant Thrust released Fist Held High, containing the call to arms “Posers Will Die!” The anthem decr
ied club lizards on “rock-star trips,” who appeared at every show but preferred chatting at the bar to headbanging. Witness to similar wars in the punk scene, the band Sonic Youth captured the us-versus-them attitude nicely with a song titled “Non Metal Dude Wearing Metal Tee.”
In a world where the most precious commodity was the fleeting sound of a sacred band, the trivial became the battleground. “Our singer’s ex-girlfriend was a really good cartoonist,” says Exodus guitarist Gary Holt, “and she drew up these comics that showed us knifing and beating up Mötley Crüe clones. We were constantly drinking and chain-sawing and jackhammering people to death. They were just for our own amusement, and then it spread off to our fans in the local club scene.”
Fueling the skirmishes, Exodus singer Paul Baloff rallied crowds with tall tales of throwing glam rockers through windows and cutting off their primped hair. “Baloff was probably the most unforgiving,” Gary Holt recalls. “After Baloff was long out of Exodus, King Diamond played in San Francisco, and Paul’s band, Piranha, was playing an after-show party. Paul had these hedge clippers he called his ‘helicopter trout,’ and he was sitting there snipping the hair off some King Diamond roadie who had a nice poser hairdo. The dude was just sitting there trying to lightly brush Paul away like he was a little insect or something, and Paul was cutting chunks until the dude’s hair was totally rearranged!”
New wave, punk, and disco all had previously served as foils to heavy metal. Now that America had gone metal, the musical family was splitting into self-righteous factions. When the innocent-looking Stryper traveled to a Dutch metal festival in 1985, the glam Christians found themselves walking into a lion’s den. “We were playing with Raven and Testament, just all these dark speed metal bands,” says singer Michael Sweet. “Everyone there just absolutely hated us. They were actually chanting ‘F-U-C-K Stryper, F-U-C-K Stryper.’ We came out to hear what they were saying, and we couldn’t believe it. We wanted to go home. We were like little boys—our knees were shaking. We changed our whole set list, and did all our heavy songs, and didn’t hold back, and told them Jesus is the way. After about five songs we won them over, but it was crazy. There was an upside-down cross with Stryper on it that they lit on fire. They had a picture of my brother’s head on a woman’s body—not a complete nudie picture, but you know the type of thing. We were dodging stuff they threw at us. It was scary.”
Yet as Stryper brought a few souls to the church, so did MTV bands indoctrinate new believers to heavy metal. Even Metallica’s James Hetfield had begun headbanger life as a major Mötley Crüe fan.
Over the long run, the so-called posers made metal visible to the public eye, and their popularity benefited the nocturnal world of the underground. “When we played our heavy music in Europe,” recalls Tom Warrior of Celtic Frost, “all we had at our shows were drunken males in leather jackets. I don’t mean that as a disrespect, it’s just a fact that ninety-five percent of the audience were males who just came to headbang their puberty out of their bodies. In America, with the same music, we had females and adults at our shows, and it was a completely different aura. It was like heaven.”
Until the day thrash metal usurped glam on a massive scale, Poison and Mötley Crüe remained the first point of access for new fans. As Chuck Klosterman wrote in his metal memoir, Fargo Rock City, “Hair metal was a wormhole for every Midwestern kid who was too naïve to understand why he wasn’t happy.”
Wild and crazy: Heavy Metal Parking Lot
(John Heyn/Jeff Krulik)
Outside Los Angeles, Headbangers Ball fueled a hilarious age of guilty pleasures, igniting the excesses of heavy metal across America as never before. Where Decline II played into the conventions of Tinseltown, photographing its subjects in soft studio sets, the crude video Heavy Metal Parking Lot documented the less glamorous customs of an arena parking lot outside a Judas Priest show in Washington, D.C. Directed by Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, the 1986 film revealed suburban teens from Maryland and Virginia drinking bourbon as they transfigured from mundane reality to concert-hall ecstasy. “We are not juvenile delinquents, although we act like that,” explained one frenetic tailgater. “We try to be civilized, but we can’t!”
In Heavy Metal Parking Lot the unfiltered reality was laid bare. The camera captured an argument over the merits of opening act Dokken, a vanload of happy Latinos in Iron Maiden and Metallica shirts, and a kid in matching zebra-striped tank top and stretch pants delivering a drunken soliloquy against punk (“It belongs on Mars”) and Madonna (“She’s a dick”). “In 1986 nobody had cameras.” says Krulik. “We lucked out. We didn’t particularly target Judas Priest, but they were at their peak, and they were headlining at the Cap Center on a spring day. They’re like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles of heavy metal. Their music will stand the test of time.”
At the soaring level of heavy metal’s success in 1987, the fan base was essentially the average American consumer: the same people that drank Pepsi, shopped at Kmart, ate at Burger King, visited Disneyland, and otherwise kept the American economy afloat. In all its silly valor, Heavy Metal Parking Lot immortalized teenagers using heavy metal to break free. Underneath the makeup and spandex the professional partygoers in Mötley Crüe were not so different in motivation. “We all came of age going through this kind of experience,” says director Krulik of his creation. “That’s what makes it, very happily so, a cultural touchstone. Someone mentions Metallica, who weren’t huge back then, and they are now enormous stars. It’s evergreen. We didn’t know what we had until almost ten years later.”
XI
United Forces:
Metal and Hardcore Punk
July 1985: S.O.D. records Speak English or Die
Summer 1985: Metallica begins playing the Misfits’ “Last Caress”
Fall 1986: Motörhead tours with Cro-Mags
1987: Napalm Death releases Scum; ends race for faster and louder
On the opposite side of the looking glass from the hair metal headbangers were the hardcore punks—virulently anti-establishment characters whose sound and culture grew from punk rock building blocks during the 1980s. Beginning with Black Flag in Los Angeles, the Misfits in New Jersey, and Bad Brains in Washington, D.C., a surging, angry wall of sound moved inward from the coasts through a string of regional teenage bands, meeting halfway in the American Midwest. Michigan was the heart of hardcore country and birthplace in 1967 of punk’s founding fathers, the Stooges. There, Die Kreuzen, Negative Approach, and the Necros from neighboring Dayton, Ohio, tore apart church basements, VFW halls, and any place an unsuspecting landlord could be convinced to allow a show.
Early-1980s do-it-yourself releases like Black Flag’s Damaged and Die Kreuzen’s Cows & Beer featured cheap, distorted guitars tearing over frantic rock drumming, and they expressed extreme dissatisfaction with adolescent norms in Middle America. These records were vinyl nonconformist manifestos—sold cheaply for gas money as bands toured an ever-shifting circuit of small college towns and fledgling urban punk scenes. The best records by the Misfits and Negative Approach were out of print by the time word of the groups could spread nationally. The meager yet vast infrastructure of hardcore simply demanded a constant wave of very similar-sounding bands coughing out intensely personal anthems about schoolyard betrayal, mental confusion, and antigovernment rebellion.
Die Kreuzen, Columbus Church, Indiana, 1981
(Scott Colburn)
In the mid-1980s a second rash of hardcore groups—known, like guerrilla cells, by initials such as GBH, SNFU, and MDC—began playing more intense hardcore that sounded like a stripped-down amateur take on speed metal. On this bleeding edge lived two highspeed masters: Texas’s Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, aka D.R.I., and North Carolina’s Corrosion of Conformity, aka C.O.C. Crossing over a new frontier of frenzy, D.R.I.’s 1983 Dirty Rotten LP fought a personal war of agitated chords and heart-attack drumbeats. Only four of twenty-two tracks were more than a minute long. “That first D.R.I. album? C’mon! That’s a record that
you can’t throw shit at,” gushes Katon W. DePena of Hirax. “Nothing’s better for that time. We’d go to see them or play with them, and there’d be a set list that had like fifty-something songs on it!”
Consequently, bands like Hirax from the powerful thrash metal end of heavy metal began to speed up, grabbing elements from the blur of hardcore punk. After lightly brushing against each other during the birthing days of Motörhead and the Damned, heavy metal fans and punks had been like warring tribes—sometimes literally doing battle in the streets of London. Earlier in the 1980s Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott was the voice of many metallers, calling punk “gutter music.” Coming from the singer of a band that shellacked its NWOBHM roots with multiplatinum MTV metal sales, however, such epithets by the late 1980s started to sound like ringing endorsements.
Katon DePena of Hirax
(Courtesy of Katon DePena)
Besides the blistering music, the hysteric paranoia of hardcore lyrics also appealed to the newly cauterized sense of civic consciousness in PMRC-persecuted metalheads. Embroiled in epic censorship struggles of its own over its 1985 Frankenchrist LP, the left-wing Dead Kennedys in particular inspired Metallica and Megadeth to replace their traditional metal mythology with lyrics that directly attacked more earthly Satans. “I really liked the Dead Kennedys because of what Jello Biafra was saying,” says Dave Mustaine of Megadeth. “A lot of the other stuff people were singing about just seemed like drivel.”